 Here in Cakewalk there's a strong relationship between the tracks view at the top here and the console view at the bottom and if I were to select a channel in the console view at the bottom its related track will be selected up here in the tracks view and if I were to hold down the alt key on my keyboard I could drag this channel to a different position and that new position will be reflected up here in the tracks view also and you probably like me already knew that. Now there's one type of channel which isn't shown in the tracks view by default and that's the buses. In my console view at the bottom you can see I've got a number of buses in this particular project. Now in order to see those in the track view like me you probably knew that you have to click this little icon here I'll click on that and that reveals all of these buses. Why would I want to do that? Well I may want to change something like the automation on these drums here I'll go to this little drop down here click on automation and I'll change the gain click on that bus input gain and then I can go in and draw in some new automation and like me you probably already knew that. There's something I didn't know I was playing with this view the other day and resizing a few things and I grabbed the top of the console here and dragged it down of course like so and then of course there's a divider between the old tracks and the buses that we can see here and as I was moving my mouse around I happened upon this little intersection here between these two panes and notice that my mouse changed to a crosshair and if I drag that around now I can resize all of these panes all in one hit with one mouse movement. Now that is something I didn't know. Hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you're well even after using Cakewalk for decades I still discover things I didn't already know. Let me know which of the following tips you didn't know about starting with this one. Here is a fairly typical drum setup for me here in Cakewalk. I'm using the SI drum kit virtual instrument which comes for free with Cakewalk and I've got three separate MIDI channels controlling it. First of all why am I using separate MIDI channels and why not just use a simple instrument which has the virtual drum kit and the MIDI all included in one sort of track. The reason I like to separate them for drums is because then I get to use drum maps and I'm using some drum maps here for example if I just double click on this hi-hat pattern here you can see that rather than the usual piano roll opening it's open this drum map which makes it much easier for me to see which drum is which and a much nicer way to work with drums using this grid here okay so that's one reason why I separate MIDI from the actual virtual instrument itself but why am I using three separate MIDI tracks well with drums I like to separate certain areas of the drum kit I've got this track which is where I'm programming or creating my hi-hat pattern this one for my kick and snare this one for my toms one of the advantages for this is I can treat them all separately for example if I wanted to apply quantizing to just the hi-hat I can just select the hi-hat pattern here and apply quantizing without affecting the other drums that's one use of it which is fairly handy but another great thing about this methodology is I can now start copying and pasting these sections over for different verses and courses etc but I can kind of mix and match them okay so I'm not always having the same hi-hat pattern with the same kick and snare for example and this helps to create much more natural drum patterns for contemporary songs but that is not the point of this tip I also want to notice that I've got all of these within a folder here yeah it's just called the si drum kit one folder and I can just squash that down so I can hide them all and open it up but I discovered something accidentally about this setup when I was playing around just the other day at the top of the folder here we can see what I thought was just some information here about you know the sort of number of MIDI tracks and the number of synths etc but it's a little bit more than information we can actually click on these to show and hide them and this makes for a much more tidy experience once you've actually written your drum parts and you've sort of finished with that MIDI you can just quickly click on the MIDI button here and that will hide all of those three MIDI tracks making the whole thing much tidier and neater to use and we can click on it again to show them just a simple little tip and trick that I didn't know till just a few days ago now here's another tip for you liking this video subscribing and ringing the bell so that you get notifications about my other videos is a great way to get a nice warm inner glow happening there's certain things that I do quite often for example I often record myself singing so I'll set up a track like this one here and usually I'll rename it to mic vocals just like this one here and often I'll color it blue that's just my habit and then I'll select an icon like this one here a little microphone to show that it was vocals and usually I use a pretty similar signal chain over here in the effects I'll use this preamp here a favorite of mine from Arturia I often use fab filter to clean things up I'll use a compressor like this one here from iK Multimedia and I also rather like this DS here from iK Multimedia as well and all of that takes a little bit of time to set up but that's what I do and I'm in the habit of doing it I feel a little foolish that it was only just the other day that I realized I could set up a template for all of this and make it all happen in just a second if I right click on this area here and go down to insert from track template I can find some templates created here under audio track templates then under vocals I can find one that I saved earlier mic vocals I click on that and hey presto it's done all of that for me it hasn't just created an audio track with that signal chain it's selected the correct input the one I would normally use it's colored it the way I want it it's selected the icon and it set up the name for me just like that please start using this and stop wasting time like I did for years and years this is not really new to me but it is being done in a slightly different way and if you google a solution for this some of the old answers may confuse you because some of the interfaces have changed recently what I want to do is take this guitar track here which is in stereo and split it into two mono tracks it's really easy to do just go up to tracks here at the top click on that then go down to bounce to tracks now there's just a couple of selections that you need to make sure of here first of all under the format area just make sure you go down to split mono click on that and then in under the area where it says what to bounce go down to source category and select tracks now it already has selected my stereo guitar there if that's not selected then just go ahead and select that then just click on okay what it's going to do is going to take those two left and right channels of that stereo track and as you can see it's now separated them into two mono channels there which we can treat separately side chaining is often used to adjust the level of one track using the signal of another track and generally we use a compressor and call it sidechain compression now I've covered this on the channel recently but I'm quickly going to cover it again now before I show you a really neat little trick using side chaining so first of all let's do sidechain compression we've got this synthesizer sound here a nice long pad sound which sounds like this and I've also got this kick drum going here but rather than hear the kick drum I just want to use its signal to adjust the level of the synth meaning I'll get this nice sort of fluctuation in volume a pulsing sound so first of all let's insert a compressor into the synth channel here I'm going to use the free one which comes with cakewalk I'll just go to the effects area here click on plus go to insert audio effects and then select sonatos compressor there okay so that's already set up there now I need to make sure I send the signal from my kick to this compressor so I'll go to the output area of the kick and I'll send that through to the sonatos sonatos compressor which is listed there we're not going to be able to hear this kick because it's only going out to the compressor not to our master bus or anything like that but it's not going to make any difference to the sound of the synth at the moment because we haven't made any adjustments to the threshold or the ratio so let's just drag down the threshold control here and then adjust the ratio here so that something should start to happen let's bring it all the way down actually this threshold and I'll just tighten up this knee so it's not too soft I'll make it nice and hard let's see what the effect of all of that is you can hear that pulsing effect which is happening as the signal from the kick affects the synth now that may be an effect that you want to achieve or you may want to still hear the sound of the kick and then have the synth move out of its way while the kick is playing that's up to you but I'm going to show you another trick now which doesn't involve using a compressor but instead using an EQ so I'll just get rid of this compressor here and I'm now going to insert a plugin which doesn't come with cakewalk it's a very popular plugin and that is the fab filter pro q3 plugin now why am I using this particular EQ because it does have a side chain capability so you don't have to use this particular EQ but you do need to use an EQ which has a side chain capability and we're going to use the kick to boost some of the frequencies of the synth so I'm just going to create a note here in pro q3 just like so and I'm going to be boosting this area here okay so I just want to increase the q slightly so I'm affecting a wider area yeah I'm just getting a bit slippery on me there we go I'll do that and now I'm actually going to turn this into a dynamic EQ okay I do that in pro q3 by adjusting this ring here okay I'm actually going to do a boost so let's move that note down to there and I'll boost things up a little bit now that is going to actually expand that frequency depending on the signal that it receives but at the moment it's just going to react to the sound of the synthesizer itself yeah like so which is not what we want we want to create a side chain so let's go over to our kick again and for its output let's now find the pro q3 here I'll just select that now the output of the kick is going to the side chain of the pro q3 and I need to make sure I turn this on in pro q3 as well so I'm just going to click on this auto button here and there's a little icon which is revealed there that's the side chain icon I'll just click on that and I'll adjust this threshold just a bit more and we'll see what happens a neat little trick which to be honest with you I'd known about for a long time but I didn't really try it out until just the other day now one of the best sources online for getting help with cakewalk is my very own Facebook group follow the link in the description down below for that and I'd love to see you over there now during this video I mentioned one of my favorite plugins of all time that's pro q from fabfilter I made a video all about why I think that's the case and you can watch that right here